To reiterate the 3rd party cookie thing, for Safari on the Mac it defaults to DENY. On all other browsers (that I know of) it defaults to ALLOW.

In a nutshell, s2ki.com sets a cookie (or a couple) on your computer to remember certain things about you and your login session so that we can know who you are between each page. The web is stateless which means each page stands on its own and each request to load an item from the server is completely stand-alone. The only way we can securely track you from page to page (like to keep you logged in for your whole visit) is to send a code to your browser that your browser well send back to our server each time it requests a page from us.

Cookies are specific to the domains of the site you visit. When you visit s2ki.com we set an s2ki.com cookie and that cookie is only sent back to s2ki.com.

However, not everything which is part of a page comes from s2ki.com. Images, youtube videos, ads and traffic statistic parts of a page can and usually do come from other sites and other domains. A post might have an embedded image from flickr for example.

When your browser loads that image, flickr's servers might try to set cookies in the flickr.com domain on your computer as well. Disabling 3rd party cookies prevents this and allows only the domain and server serving the main page (not the content within the page) to set cookies on your computer. To set a cookie, you would have to go to flickr.com directly, like by clicking a hyperlink.

In the case of flickr this may not be a big issue but in the case of things like ads or monitization related stuff you may not want google or Facebook or Quantcast or ABC Market Research Company tracking you as you navigate around the Internet by where your unique cookie shows up.

In the case of Google for example, if you don't have 3rd party cookies disabled, Google is able to track your visits to every site containing google ads. Using this information then know when you surf, where you surf and what you surf. Using that data and the statistics collected from their search engine, maps, gmail and calendar they can put together a very accurate profile of who you are, what you like and what you do. You would probably be shocked at just how complete a profile of you, your activities, your interests and your social circle.

Personally, I'd rather not leave that big a wake. If you are similarly minded then I recommend disabling 3rd party cookies (or confirming they are disabled).

 

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